Public education is one of the most important “public goods” of a democratic society. In recent decades, public policy analysts, public intellectuals, and politicians have debated the state of public education in the United States and have argued about the sorts of public policies that might best promote the academic achievement, educational success, and political socialization of youth. Terry Moe and John Chubb have been important contributors to these debates. Their 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, set the terms of much subsequent discussion about the importance of school autonomy and “educational choice.” Moe's Special Interest extends these arguments through a more frontal critique of the role of teachers unions. This book represents an important contribution to public discussion of school reform. It also incorporates a distinctive perspective on the relationship between power and public policy, and between the role of states and that of markets in the provision of public goods and services. In this symposium, we feature a range of serious commentaries on the book's central arguments about educational policy and politics and on its approach to “engaged” or “applied” political science.

The study of nonviolent civil resistance is now in vogue. The American Political Science Association gave its best book award this year to Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, authors of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Additionally, in the last few years, there have been an unprecedented number of academic books, edited volumes, and journal special issues published on this topic, largely due to interest generated by the Arab Spring uprisings and the “color revolutions” in post-communist regions.

Hurricane Katrina was a “disaster” both “natural” and “social.” The storm destroyed a major American city that, like most American cities, was already the site of great inequality and vulnerability. It also dramatically put to the test both the logistical capabilities and the political responsibilities of national, state, and local governmental institutions. The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans is an important collection of essays on the dynamics of “remaking New Orleans” and the limits of that effort. We have thus asked a diverse group of political scientists to review the book, and at the same time to treat it as an opportunity to reflect on two related questions: 1) What are the most important economic, cultural, and political dimensions of the crisis precipitated by Katrina, both for New Orleans and for US cities more generally? 2) What resources does political science as a discipline possess to help us understand these issues, and can political science as a discipline do a better job on this score?—Jeffrey C. Issac, Editor

Vigorous exchanges between those who study charged topics like transitional justice using different approaches can be very helpful in progressing our understanding of the complex issues. But those reading this exchange between James Gibson and me could be left puzzled. While my review of Gibson's work shows how our two approaches can be harmonized, Gibson's review of Skeletons may urge readers to question whether, given such seemingly irreconcilable differences, transitional justice remains one field.

The Speaker of the House: A Study of Leadership. By Matthew N. Green. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 292p. $30.00.

In his book, Matthew N. Green investigates Speakers' purposive goals, tactical options, and legislative influence. The overriding thesis: Speakers' actions do not simply reflect “the majority of the majority's” interests and preferences, but rather emerge from a more diverse set of goals. As Green argues: “Speakers may exercise legislative leadership on behalf of the preferences of others besides the majority party in Congress [including] representing his or her own district … achieving his or her own preferred policy outcome … helping the party's president, the institutional presidency, or the House as a whole” (p. 17).

Public education is one of the most important “public goods” of a democratic society. In recent decades, public policy analysts, public intellectuals, and politicians have debated the state of public education in the United States and have argued about the sorts of public policies that might best promote the academic achievement, educational success, and political socialization of youth. Terry Moe and John Chubb have been important contributors to these debates. Their 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, set the terms of much subsequent discussion about the importance of school autonomy and “educational choice.” Moe's Special Interest extends these arguments through a more frontal critique of the role of teachers unions. This book represents an important contribution to public discussion of school reform. It also incorporates a distinctive perspective on the relationship between power and public policy, and between the role of states and that of markets in the provision of public goods and services. In this symposium, we feature a range of serious commentaries on the book's central arguments about educational policy and politics and on its approach to “engaged” or “applied” political science.

Hurricane Katrina was a “disaster” both “natural” and “social.” The storm destroyed a major American city that, like most American cities, was already the site of great inequality and vulnerability. It also dramatically put to the test both the logistical capabilities and the political responsibilities of national, state, and local governmental institutions. The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans is an important collection of essays on the dynamics of “remaking New Orleans” and the limits of that effort. We have thus asked a diverse group of political scientists to review the book, and at the same time to treat it as an opportunity to reflect on two related questions: 1) What are the most important economic, cultural, and political dimensions of the crisis precipitated by Katrina, both for New Orleans and for US cities more generally? 2) What resources does political science as a discipline possess to help us understand these issues, and can political science as a discipline do a better job on this score?—Jeffrey C. Issac, Editor

Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa. By James L. Gibson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 328p. $92.00.

All three of James Gibson's books on transitional justice in South Africa focus on showing that the politics of reconciliation with the Apartheid regime are less related to economic “self-interest” than to “sociotropic fairness.” On close examination, Gibson concludes that an individual's preferences about land reconciliation are not a direct function of egocentric instrumentalism. Rather, in his view, they are shaped by conceptions of whether one's group has been fairly treated.

In democracies, the rich protect their freedom with wealth, and the people protect theirs with laws. This notion, associated with Demosthenes in classical Athens, and revived by Leonardo Bruni in republican Florence, imputes a roughly fair equilibrium to popular government: Private wealth and public institutions, so the truism goes, combine in democracies to ensure that both wealthy and common citizens live with fewer arbitrary restrictions on their behavior than in any other kind of regime.

Hurricane Katrina was a “disaster” both “natural” and “social.” The storm destroyed a major American city that, like most American cities, was already the site of great inequality and vulnerability. It also dramatically put to the test both the logistical capabilities and the political responsibilities of national, state, and local governmental institutions. The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans is an important collection of essays on the dynamics of “remaking New Orleans” and the limits of that effort. We have thus asked a diverse group of political scientists to review the book, and at the same time to treat it as an opportunity to reflect on two related questions: 1) What are the most important economic, cultural, and political dimensions of the crisis precipitated by Katrina, both for New Orleans and for US cities more generally? 2) What resources does political science as a discipline possess to help us understand these issues, and can political science as a discipline do a better job on this score?—Jeffrey C. Issac, Editor

Matthew Beckmann offers a penetrating, insightful, and eminently fair review of my book. Although I agree with most of his critiques, I offer my thoughts with respect to three questions that Beckmann says are not fully addressed by my study.

First, I would like to declare how much I appreciate the opportunity to engage in this dialogue with Monika Nalepa. As I have said, her work on lustration constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of transitional justice processes.

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does American political science look when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Pushing the Agenda: Presidential Leadership in U.S. Lawmaking, 1953–2004. By Matthew N. Beckmann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 194p. $99.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

The American president is many things. He serves as the head of state, chief of his political party, manager of the national bureaucracy, commander of the armed forces, and even (to some at least) a moral leader of the country. But one of the most important roles of the president is legislative leader: setting the nation's policy agenda, proposing new bills, and steering key initiatives through Congress. The central nature of that role is evidenced by our tendency to think of past presidents in terms of their trademark policy proposals, be it Harry “Fair Deal” Truman or Ronald Reagan's “Reaganomics.”

I am very grateful to John McCormick for his excellent review of Oligarchy. It is careful and thoughtful, and I especially appreciate the important criticisms he raises. On Rome, I fully concur that the scholarship in the “democratic school” raises important interpretative challenges. But I must confess to being more persuaded by the compelling work of Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, Kurt Raaflaub, Robert Morstein-Marx, and especially Henrik Mouritsen than the admittedly influential authors McCormick cites. Fergus Millar and others have been criticized for their overly constitutional approach and relying perhaps too heavily on democratic discourse. Emphasizing factors like scale, place, and how power was exercised in actual practice, Mouritsen counters that the involvement of the poor—the vast majority—in the political affairs of Rome was exceedingly limited. At the contiones, “the people” were present more as a political concept than physically in attendance. The capacity of the comitium was at most 4,000 people for a demos of some five million citizens—who were themselves a privileged minority among tens of millions of non-citizens and slaves. The heavy time demands of direct democracy on these citizens trying to eke out a living would have been a major burden. Whatever democracy really meant or achieved in Rome (and Athens), it clearly did not aid the lower classes materially. There was a steady accumulation of wealth and power upward toward oligarchs as debt and poverty worsened among the plebs.

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does American political science look when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

In Pushing the Agenda, I sought to revisit the basic tenets of presidential coalition building on Capitol Hill. My hope was that tracing the White House's lobbying strategies would not only reveal how they are intended to work but also offer a better blueprint for assessing if they do. To those ends, I theorized that the White House has two basic lobbying strategies—an early game (agenda-centered) strategy aimed at shaping the legislative alternatives considered and an endgame (vote-centered) strategy aimed at determining which prevailed. Tests with a diverse assortment of original data—on the practice of lobbying, the results of key roll-call votes, and the passage of new laws—all corroborated a key point: presidential coalition building operates differently than scholars have thought, with effects greater than previously realized.

Imagine an America in which indictments by the people could be brought against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for the secret bombing of neutral Cambodia that killed thousands of civilians and paved the way for the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Imagine a college of tribunes, drawn by lot exclusively from the pool of ordinary citizens, that could initiate charges against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Yoo as torturers, or indict the heads of financial institutions for the crimes that triggered economic ruin in 2008. Consider how different American democracy might be if its governing institutions included a body of and for the plebs, empowered to veto one major piece of legislation a year (perhaps the recent extension of the Bush tax cuts) or oversee an annual national referendum (maybe on a single-payer health insurance plan).